Bleemcast eliminates all of the post processing effects (such as motion blur which was heavily used in MGS) while reducing the sound quality quite a bit. It's neat, but not a great way to play the game.

D-Member

I took what I believe is a representative screenshot of Mario 64 actually running on a Nintendo 64, just for funsies.

There are no N64 emulators that are designed to run the games just as they were, so it's hard to really get a handle on how games actually looked like. I think the N64 had some form of edge AA, I enabled 2X full screen AA and AF to sort of reproduce the perceived IQ. I set resolution to 320x240, which was the norm.

I only recently added one to my collection and, outside of a few classics, it's very difficult to find great N64 games. Most of the carts I've ended up collecting are PC ports of games I wanted to see running on N64.

The PSX holds up far better today with a wider variety of more playable games (especially 2D games and the simple but smooth 60 fps 3D games). Nearly everything on N64 consists of blurry polygon based visuals with a very low framerate.

There are no N64 emulators that are designed to run the games just as they were, so it's hard to really get a handle on how games actually looked like. I think the N64 had some form of edge AA, I enabled 2X full screen AA and AF to sort of reproduce the perceived IQ. I set resolution to 320x240, which was the norm.

That's close, but as you noted, still off. The HUD elements are displayed at a clean 240p on a real N64 with hard pixels. It looks much better than what you see there.

The N64 also produces very messy filtering. You might be right about some sort of edge filter going on. I'm not sure how they would have done it but games on n64 are surprisingly clean. The hard polygon edges in Mario 64 are surprisingly smooth rather than jaggy on a real SDTV.

What you get with an emulators does not really resemble the real thing.

Definitely subjective. The only N64 games that I think are still worth playing today are Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and the Zelda games. Maybe stuff like the Banjo games could be included, too. (I never played Conker's Bad Fur Day, so I won't comment on that).

I feel like there are a large host of PS1 games that are still totally worth playing today, though. Especially if you're looking at the RPG genre, which the N64 was sorely lacking in.

D-Member

Wave Race 64 and Super Mario 64 are the two games that aged the best, as far as I'm concerned. They still play beautifully. On the other hand both Zeldas are a little wonky compared to the much more refined controls of Wind Waker and post-WW Zelda games.

F-Zero X is up there too because of dat 60fps, but I don't really care for how loose the gameplay is compared to the SNES game.

That's close, but as you noted, still off. The HUD elements are displayed at a clean 240p on a real N64 with hard pixels. It looks much better than what you see there.

The N64 also produces very messy filtering. You might be right about some sort of edge filter going on. I'm not sure how they would have done it but games on n64 are surprisingly clean. The hard polygon edges in Mario 64 are surprisingly smooth rather than jaggy on a real SDTV.

What you get with an emulators does not really resemble the real thing.

Yeah it's a shame, we can't really have a proper comparison. Fuck man the best N64 emulator out there doesn't even properly output captures either, they're hideously compressed jpegs. Had to prntscrn and then crop it in photoshop.

Also 60fps, also high resolution, cleaner image quality and the use of mostly gourad shading on the characters went a long way in making it age really well. The animation is also, of course, incredible. Not graphically related, but it did full 3D movement before Soul Calibur(and did it better too).

This thread is starting to teeter on the edge of insanity. ALL games ran interlaced on the N64 and PS1(and Saturn). And 99% of PS2 games.

Banned

Another thing to consider is that while 3D on the PS1 looked sometimes okay in screenshots, when you saw it in motion compared to the N64 it was night and day. The PS1 was just a mess of swimming pixels a lot of the time.

Digital Foundry pixel pusher

Another thing to consider is that while 3D on the PS1 looked sometimes okay in screenshots, when you saw it in motion compared to the N64 it was night and day. The PS1 was just a mess of swimming pixels a lot of the time.

Everything can be pirated. It may take some time for the protection to be bypassed, but eventually someone will find a way to crack it open. I think the PS3 may actually be the console that has gone the longest before getting cracked open to piracy. Didn't it take 2-3 years before CFW was available?

Remember CD drives were the blu-ray drives of today (not to be confused with the blu-ray drives at the start of this gen ) the media was cheap, but the drive itself was still relatively expensive... Add into the fact that Nintendo would likely have needed more RAM for caching (access time would have been way to slow for it's 4k of texture ram) and the N64 could easily have added another $50-100 per the cost of the console.

It'd be akin to saying "PS1 would have easily blown the N64 out of the water if it had $99 additional worth of video hardware in it!"

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Everything can be pirated. It may take some time for the protection to be bypassed, but eventually someone will find a way to crack it open. I think the PS3 may actually be the console that has gone the longest before getting cracked open to piracy. Didn't it take 2-3 years before CFW was available?

My theory is that Yamauchi liked playing hard ball with other companies (who had to buy all the carts from Nintendo and couldn't make more soon enough if the game sold particularly well due to the nature of the used games industry in Japan).

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My theory is that Yamauchi liked playing hard ball with other companies (who had to buy all the carts from Nintendo and couldn't make more soon enough if the game sold particularly well due to the nature of the used games industry in Japan).

Carts didn't help Nintendo avoid piracy. Carts, was quite simply, a dumb decision. When the N64 was finally released it had been two years since the PS1 was released and Nintendo inexplicably failed to see how developers and consumers had embraced the format.

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More of a comment on their style, which admittedly isn't my cup of tea but clearly has appeal for other people. I've always thought ND had come up with linear Uncharted-like level designs just recently.

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More of a comment on their style, which admittedly isn't my cup of tea but clearly has appeal for other people. I've always thought ND had come up with linear Uncharted-like level designs just recently.

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If you can't print more copies of a game soon enough to cover demand, people will just buy the games used. Games lose value fairly slowly over time so a person who buys a new game and sells it a week later will end up paying a reasonable amount for the experience. It makes up for game rentals not being allowed.

One effect in Beetle Adventure Racing that was really impressive at the time was that in-game objects would be reflected off of the cars' surface. No it wasn't technically correct, but it still looked cool.

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One effect in Beetle Adventure Racing that was really impressive at the time was that in-game objects would be reflected off of the cars' surface. No it wasn't technically correct, but it still looked cool.

I still work with the guy that implemented that effect (Richard Baker.) If I remember right, it worked by scaling the previous frame down into an N64 sized texture, probably 32x32, then generating UV coordinates for the reflection pass ala. environment mapping. Like many image based effects it is a ridiculous fake, but looked awesome.

I still work with the guy that implemented that effect (Richard Baker.) If I remember right, it worked by scaling the previous frame down into an N64 sized texture, probably 32x32, then generating UV coordinates for the reflection pass ala. environment mapping. Like many image based effects it is a ridiculous fake, but looked awesome.

Yeah, even back then I could tell how it was done, but it still looked cool and was something I hadn't seen in other games. I guess you can tell him it was such a neat effect that some people still remember it.

Poorly written on my part, but that's what I meant to say. No home console system from that era ran at 60FPS progressive scan. 60FPS games are really running at 30Hz(or 31Hz) even though they're rendering two images together interlaced at once. Though the Dreamcast did have a VGA mode with 480p 60fps progressive scan. Though apparently the Saturn did support progressive scan to a certain degree as well. But I don't think any game ever supported it, nor is there any way to enable this mode without hard wiring the Saturn to do so.

There were a few other Saturn games that ran in that higher resolution, though. Dead or Alive, Decathlete, Winter Heat, Last Bronx, Anarchy in the Nippon, All Japan Pro Wrestling... A good chunk of games use it exclusively in menus, and some even mix low-resolution and high-resolution elements in-game (Toshinden URA, Fighters Megamix).

Interesting read, thanks! Reading what you are saying about triangle polygons vs. quads I wonder; did the developers have to remodel every 3D model for the Saturn version to models with quads? Or am I not understanding this right?

Umm... as far as I know, exporting a quad based model to a triangles is easy, as you can make quads out of triangles. But exporting a triangle based model to quads is not so easy. But it really depends on the complexity of the model. So I would imagine that in most cases, yes. Models would have to be rebuilt for the Saturn when porting from the PS1.

Quads do have a few advantages over triangle, but they also have many disadvantages as well. In the Saturn's case, quads did have less texture warping and distortion than the PS1's triangle based rendering. You could actually also render curved surfaces much easier on quads than you could in triangles. But things like clipping and collision detection are much more of a pain in the ass to deal with for programmers. This is why the entire PC industry adopted triangles as the main form of rendering over quads.

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I wonder what could be done with a chipset with the transistor count and power draw as the n64 chipset but with greater knowledge of how graphics chips should be built. Like, what could it do with a redesign.

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Yeah, even back then I could tell how it was done, but it still looked cool and was something I hadn't seen in other games. I guess you can tell him it was such a neat effect that some people still remember it.